If that's the ONLY research you do - sure, horrible approach. But as part of an approach with other research, it's fine. The people using the product are the ones who'll be able to tell you about all the warts. And they're often folks that have tried out other frameworks that do equivalent things and can tell you why they picked the one they did.

SAP's toolkit for developing html5 web apps. It's not as bad as you would think, and it doesn't require a server-side component..

naaaahh. As long as that stuff is generated from SAP Dynpros, its absolute non maintainable. SAP and HTML were and still are 2 different worlds which still dont harmonize. i am watching their attemtps to compete in html market, but i think they missed the train...almost years ago. You will still need expensive SAP consultants just to create HTML/JS Code? wtf?
even if that library works standalone, the knowledge came from SAP "coders", perhaps former ABAP-enthusiasts...ExtJS is far beyond

@wm003: Actually, i've taken a look at SAP's HTML5 UI toolkit, and it's indeed not as bad as you would think. It's very un-SAP-like.

It is purely client-side, and integrates with the server via OData (similar to the Sencha Touch SAP example from a while ago). It's basically a coherent set of dataset-backed widgets on top of jQuery where the datasets have easy bindings with an OData service (but you can integrate them with anything server-side). When I looked at it there wasn't an MVC architecture, so you're on your own as far as structuring your code goes, but other than that it was not bad at all. The whole thing is styled with LESS, and the default L&F doesn't look half bad (better than ExtJS's blue theme at least).

Thanks for the link. Well that actually makes a difference then (because the main "Ext alternative" ist jquery UI then)
From SAP side this is a much better approach then they tried the past years (what i meant with generated HTML stuff out of Dynpros...)

With SASS it's really pretty easy to theme an app. It does take some patience but after a day you can get quite far. I have an app that use gray and green with no rounded corners. Not complete because I haven't gotten back to it and it's not a high priority of mine.

With SASS it's really pretty easy to theme an app. It does take some patience but after a day you can get quite far.

With SASS, the CSS is easier, but SASS+ExtJS is not, as the Sencha approach of structuring a project with the include structure and scripts, the modern IDE SASS support is quite useless, so the productivity win is lost .

Also, I would not be that proud that it takes at least 1 day to get something started, when e.g. with the jQueryUI Theme roller: http://jqueryui.com/themeroller/ a total newbie (even a non-programmer) can get fantastic results after 10 minutes.